Welcome to Transform’s Founder Spotlight Series, an exciting journey into the minds of innovative leaders who are disrupting the now and next of work.
In each Q&A-style article, we’ll introduce you to founders like Chengchen (“CC”) Li, Founder of Penguin Benefits, who are redefining the boundaries of their industries with forward-thinking ideas and transformative approaches.
About
Chengchen (“CC”) Li, FSA, CLMS, MSx, has a unique blend of deep insurance industry knowledge and the human-centric design thinking approach to innovation.
With nearly ten years of experience as an actuary and four as a Certified Leave Management Specialist, CC understands the insurance product development process and modeling methods for financial contracts and regulations.
The potential of using modeling and her personal experience navigating the complexity of leave benefits sparked her interest in leveraging technology and innovation to address the complexity of leave planning.
Combining her professional background with a passion for solving pain points for working parents, CC founded Penguin Benefits in 2020 to simplify and streamline the process of understanding and accessing parental leave benefits. The platform uses advanced algorithms and user-friendly interfaces to provide employees with personalized guidance and support throughout the parental leave planning process.
About Penguin Benefits
Penguin Benefits was launched in 2020 by a working parent who found it difficult to navigate complex parental leave options and wanted to help other families access their benefits with ease. Today, Penguin Benefits’ cutting-edge SaaS platform demystifies parental leave benefits for expecting, adoptive, and foster parents.
Leveraging advanced algorithms combined with user-friendly interfaces, Penguin delivers a leading tool for enabling a comprehensive view of employees’ entitled leave benefits. Designed with intuitive navigation and validated by deep consumer research, our patent-pending platform helps families access their parental leave benefits with ease. Employees gain a solid foundational understanding of available benefits while HR teams and leave administrators gain efficiencies through an integrated leave benefits education and planning process.
Let’s dive into CC’s founder story and learn firsthand about his inspirations, challenges, and breakthroughs that marked her path to success.
The Startup Journey
Transform: What gave you the idea of starting Penguin Benefits?
CC was working on her Masters in Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business when she came up with the idea for Penguin Benefits. While researching the insurance needs of new parents with her peers at Stanford, she repeatedly heard how frustrating it was for working parents to learn about and understand the parental leave entitlements available to them. This deeply resonated with her as she had experienced similar frustrations when planning her own leave.
As she dug further into this research, she realized the opportunity to potentially solve a significant societal problem. She looked at a broader view of the issue by interviewing a wide range of stakeholders in the space, including employees, employer HR teams, insurers, third-party administrators, software providers, consultants and brokers, representatives from state benefit programs, and other industry experts, to learn what needed to be addressed for each type of stakeholder.
Product Development:
Transform: Who benefits from Penguin Benefits?
CC: Employees are the “end users” and, therefore, the primary beneficiaries of the tool. However, a by-product of its use is the improved efficiencies it creates for employers (specifically HR teams) overwhelmed by the complexities of federal and state leave programs, which they need to understand to help their employees. In addition, leave administrators benefit since they can provide a self-service platform that enhances the parental leave planning experience and demonstrates their commitment to delivering employee-centric offerings.
Overall, we see the power of the platform being its ability to ease the burden on both employers and their employees, as it helps working families seamlessly navigate complex leave laws and parental leave benefits.
Transform: Why is this so important?
CC: We see the reason as twofold. It’s critical to support working families (employees), as this benefits their physical and mental health during a major life event. In addition, it’s important to offer support for employers to increase the retention of valued employees while enabling a more diverse workforce (i.e. by encouraging working parents to remain in the workforce).
Scaling and Growth
Transform: How do you build a strong company culture at Penguin Benefits while scaling the business?
CC: Everyone on our team at Penguin cares deeply about the needs of our end users and partners. Because we use an iterative approach to product development, we are all engaged in making decisions and identifying solutions that best solve real-world problems. This connection to a common goal really binds us and helps us work closely together.
Our team is comprised of knowledgeable, passionate individuals who are committed to utilizing all of our skill sets to build a product that society will benefit from. This, in turn, has influenced our ability to grow and scale as we’re conditioned to continually gather feedback and analyze every product or business decision we make, and back it up with solid data and insights.
Fundraising
Transform: How do you maintain strong relationships with your investors and optimize their contributions?
CC: Many, in fact most, investors are leaders and experts in the insurance industry, so they deeply understand and resonate with our approach. We optimize their contributions by intensely focusing on only the things that matter, learning from their observations and feedback, and then quickly adapting our strategy based on what we learn.
Team Building & Leadership
Transform: What are your strategies for attracting and retaining talent at Penguin Benefits?
CC: We attract team members who are deeply familiar with our industry, the problem we are solving, and the market that we serve. We also attract people who align with our design thinking and iterative mindset. These individuals really align with our goals and passion. We see the complexity of the problem only increasing as is the demand for our tool. This is exciting for our team because the need is already great and growing.
We’ve been fortunate to connect fairly organically with those who will be a good fit for our team based on their knowledge and experience. We benefit from leveraging our network of advisors and investors as well. In combination, this approach has been working for us to find individuals who are strongly committed to our organization’s mission.
Marketing & Branding
Transform: How do you differentiate your brand from competitors?
CC: This leave benefits space that we play in is very complex due to the interactions of the benefits system we have at the state level, employer level, and private insurance sector. Better technology is needed, and we see products entering the space focused on this problem. However, where we set ourselves apart is how we seek to simplify the complexities for all stakeholders involved.
Many members of our team are deeply rooted in the insurance and benefits industry. We not only understand the pain points of the end users but also the evolution of existing processes, dynamics between key stakeholders, and how to best connect these different needs and perspectives to address a complex problem that spans federal, state, insurer, and employer benefits perspectives.
I believe this makes us unique in that we continuously iterate on not only our product but also our business model and go-to-market strategy based on all of these insights. This positions us to provide a solution that is sustainable and meets the needs of all key stakeholders.
Challenges & Lessons Learned
Transform: Can you share any specific lessons or mistakes you made during the startup journey and how you overcame them?
CC: Every mistake is a valuable lesson, where we gather insights for the next product iteration. There have been so many lessons, but one in particular stands out.
We started the business focused on building a leave navigation tool for consumers because that’s where we saw the most confusion existed around leave benefits.
Then we realized that consumers also simply don’t know what they don’t know about the various leave benefits that exist. Once we understood this was the true pain point, we had to pivot so we could actually help them gather all the relevant information from official sources (such as their employers or leave administrators) and also deliver this information in a digestible format.
So while our platform is still designed for consumers as the end user, we expanded our business model to significantly elevate the user experience by improving how we gather and deliver information about their benefits plans.
Industry and Market Insights
Transform: What is one significant trend or prediction that you believe will drive the transformation of work?
CC: More employers are seeking to offer benefits to support the well-being of employees and their families. We see more self-service tools being created in the coming years that enable a distributed workforce to learn and manage their benefits and enable HR teams to better support the workforce as more complexities around benefits and compliance evolve.
Company Vision
Transform: What would you like to say to People leaders who are thinking of using Penguin Benefits?
CC: We know how complicated the world of employee benefits has become, specifically when it comes to offering competitive options that attract and retain talent. It’s never been more important to look at the employee experience you’re providing to ensure they feel supported and valued. We feel that our platform is a key way to demonstrate that commitment. Offering leave benefits to employees and giving them a tool like Penguin Benefits to encourage them to better understand and access their benefits helps employers demonstrate their commitment to employees, which leads to attracting and retaining great team members.
Check out other inspiring Founder Spotlights on the Transform blog.